Targeted Adjustments in Adobe® Photoshop®

Lesson 3 of 12

Subtle vs Accurate Adjustments

Targeted Adjustments in Adobe® Photoshop®

Lesson 3 of 12

Subtle vs Accurate Adjustments

Lesson Info

Subtle vs Accurate Adjustments

Let's talk about accuracy versus subtlety subtlety is not really my strong suit, as you might have figured out by now, but we're going to try and be a little bit subtle with some of our adjustments, so I'm gonna make a selection, so I'm just using the quick selection tool here and I will just click and drag across the sky and again, don't worry too much about the specific technique in this case, we'll just we'll talk about some of the technique later, but just the overall concept related to subtlety versus accuracy. So if I zoom in on this election, you can see pretty clearly that selection doesn't seem to be super accurate, is that okay? That depends sometimes it's ok, sometimes it's not what kind of adjustment do I need to apply so again, don't worry about how I'm accomplishing all this stuff. I will cover all of this shortly, but if we take a look at this very strong adjustment, not subtle and not accurate, a very bad combination, so if you need a strong adjustment, then your lawyer...

mask needs to be accurate here, for example, following the tree line, you can see that my adjustment is going into the trees or darkening the tree in addition to the sky, but then we've got little bits of sky showing through that are not being darkened so that's a problem? It also underscores an issue if you're concerned about self esteem, little extra tip bonus tip one of the worst things you can do if self esteem is an issue is zoom in on a photo. One of the best things you can do is zoom out if you zoom out really, really far, the adjustment looks really, really great, and so it's probably a good idea to zoom in a little bit and make sure that you're making a good adjustment or that you've got an accurate mask, but if we're making a subtle adjustment, what if I just wanted to tone down the sky just a tiny little bit? Then my adjustment, my selection doesn't need to be as accurate, so as I take that adjustment up and up and up, making it less strong right about there, approximately now the accuracy is no problem. I haven't inaccurate later, man ask so to speak. I have a not good layer mask, but because my adjustment is relatively subtle, I could get away with it. So in many cases, if you're just toning something down, you're making a minor little adjustment to the image you don't have to sweat having a highly accurate layer mass, going to turn off my adjustment and turn it back on it's still a reasonably strong adjustment. But because it's not terribly strong, I could get away with it. Now, if we zoom in really close in this case, we'll still see that some work could be done to improve things. We'll see how we do that work a little bit later, but again, the key message at the moment is if your adjustments pretty subtle, you don't have to worry quite so much about accuracy, so I wouldn't work on painstakingly creating a perfect selection if you're just darkening down the sky by a third of a stop because you don't need that degree of accuracy in that type of situation. So just something that I think is worth keeping in mind when you're working on your images and you feel like you're going to need to make a strong adjustment you, then you'll need to make a more accurate layer mask it's going to be a subtle adjustment, then you can make amore, you know, kind of haphazard her past, as it were, not that I encourage haphazard nous by any stretch, but it is a little bit of flexibility there when your adjustments aren't extremely strong.

Class Description

Targeted adjustments in Adobe® Photoshop® give you incredible power when editing photographs. Learn how they can quickly transform your images in Targeted Adjustments in Adobe® Photoshop® with Tim Grey.

Tim will help you truly understand the concepts and functionality behind layer masking. You’ll learn how you can apply adjustments to specific areas of a photo. Tim will demonstrate selection techniques, painting on layer masks, and using gradients. You’ll develop the skills you need to make impactful and efficient adjustments.